[HN Gopher] LaTeX Cookbook - Collection of LaTeX Recipes
___________________________________________________________________
LaTeX Cookbook - Collection of LaTeX Recipes
Author : gjvc
Score : 183 points
Date : 2021-12-24 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (latex-cookbook.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (latex-cookbook.net)
| anyfactor wrote:
| Crisp. That is the word that pops in my head whenever I see
| something that is generated by LaTeX. I am not sure why or how to
| define it.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > Crisp.
|
| Please open any of the publications in
| https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html (pdf versions)
| and then get your own opinion on whether anything else is crisp
| ;-)
| anyfactor wrote:
| > https://www.texmacs.org/joris/surhypexp/surhypexp.pdf
|
| I saw "France" at the top of the document and I quickly
| scrolled the document thinking, "Looks crisp French to me."
|
| Then it dawned on me.....
| dash2 wrote:
| you sure it's crisp? Not another word starting with cr and
| ending with p?
|
| Seriously, TeX is a bad maths language
| [http://xahlee.info/cmaci/notation/TeX_pestilence.html],
| surrounded by a terrible document markup language, wrapped in
| tooling straight from the 1980s, plus a community only too
| willing to tell you how your question is wrong.
| anyfactor wrote:
| haha, I don't have much experience with mathematical equation
| writing in LaTeX, I just like how the words and document
| look. So I can't say much about this.
|
| Have you looked into Groff >>
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/527864/latex-vs-
| grof...
|
| I have heard atleast one people say that, the math syntax is
| much more elegant in groff as opposed to LaTex.
| gjvc wrote:
| In the 90s, I used to imagine the future to be one where
| "browsers" would be _much less_ than combined JavaScript
| execution / DOM+CSS layout engines and hence able to do _much
| more_ by downloading (signed) decoders /renderers on-demand for
| different content types, of which DVI would be just one of
| many.
|
| There are still huge conceptual leaps to be made in the notion
| of a computer as a document creator and content rendering, and
| Smalltalk provides some clues in that direction, though I doubt
| we'll see it in my lifetime, considering the weight of the last
| twenty-five years will make it difficult to change course.
|
| The relevance of the above flight of fantasy to your point is
| that LaTeX, for all its awkwardness, is absolutely a local
| maxima in document creation, and I love seeing its results
| appear from the markup, knowing that it's following the numbers
| precisely, as if by magic, and print them out and marvel at the
| quality of the fonts close-up, and _we need more such systems
| with which to create and render content_ , before denting the
| DOM+CSS hegemony in the manner I described above.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The whole issue with LaTeX ia that it renders to PDFs, which
| aren't appropriate these days any more for most electronic
| documents because you want reflowable content rather than
| fixed layout. And (m)HTML is great for that and can _include_
| other content types :
|
| https://eater.net/quaternions
| GiovanniP wrote:
| As far as I know the main issue there is that LaTeX is a
| Turing-complete language and no reliable complete export
| filter can exist, so in particular one cannot export
| reliably all of LaTeX to HTML
| NotOscarWilde wrote:
| I don't think Turing-completeness implies any issues when
| converting programs between equally powerful automata. In
| fact, a lot of results in the theory of automata / early
| computational complexity take a form of converting all
| programs of machine A -- in fact the machine itself -- in
| order to run it on machine B.
| gjvc wrote:
| I'm afraid you rather missed the point in the last
| paragraph -- "we need more such systems with which to
| create and render content, before denting the DOM+CSS
| hegemony". Fixed format is much preferable for textbooks or
| other publications which have many diagrams as part of the
| body text.
| ansgri wrote:
| Please show me a reflowable document with decent
| typographics. No, seriously, why browsers don't implement
| fully-featured layout algorithms? Until then, I'd prefer a
| well-typeset PDF over an average website for a longer-form
| and graphics-rich content.
|
| Also, those are naturally usable offline, are durable and
| have no interactive annoyances.
| leephillips wrote:
| Your point is spot-on. Reflowable text is incompatible
| with most scientific writing and with anything more
| complex than simple prose.
| ansgri wrote:
| Somehow it's "characteristically ugly" for me, looking at these
| examples specifically. You can get good-looking documents in
| LaTeX if you customize formatting just a little bit, but the
| default colors, shapes and even fonts are just off. Especially
| Beamer.
|
| It's really like a style of clothing: a sort of old man's suit
| that looks normal in academic institutions but in most other
| settings you do look like you've just come from that
| institution.
|
| The typesetting is much better than anything in common (non-
| design-professional) use though.
| gjvc wrote:
| 100% agree. Some people have a fetish for wide aspect ratio
| fonts, such as some of the Computer Modern family. Must have
| been the fashion at some point.
| anyfactor wrote:
| I agree with you what you said.
|
| On the flip side of the coin, I would say don't attempt to
| customize it. LaTeX out of the box is essentially what you
| need for an easy to read document.
|
| There is no LaTeX graphic designer out there. I would agree
| to a little defeat and say the poster example on that website
| looked bad. If customizability is something people are
| looking for LaTeX is not the ideal choice because the
| learning curve for advance use can be incredibly steep, you
| may not have a good eye for good graphics if you are using
| LaTex in the first place and you might compromise early and
| say good enough.
| canjobear wrote:
| It's true. There's an accumulation of small details involving
| spacing that LaTeX gets right but something like Word gets
| wrong, each of them individually almost imperceptible, but
| adding up to an effect where the LaTeX document looks somehow
| clean and correct, and the Word document looks like a big mess.
| I can detect a Word document almost immediately on sight but it
| takes me a while to follow up and find the concrete evidence of
| Wordness.
| WolfOliver wrote:
| I wonder what you thing about https://www.monsterwriter.app/ ...
| I'm exchanging a free licence for valuable feedback :)
| enriquto wrote:
| It's not clear from the website what this is. Does it convert
| text files to pdf? Please show the source text file on the
| landing page. Can you describe the figures easily inside the
| text file? It's so light on details that I don't even know if
| I'm interested or not.
|
| LaTeX, for simple articles and light math, is trivial to use
| and problem-free. The complexities arise when you try to do
| fancier stuff. How much fancy stuff do you allow in
| monsterwriter? Does it support multiple language conventions on
| the same article? Can I generate monsterwriter articles
| programatically in an easy way? Can I prepare a pdf
| presentation with animations like in beamer? A poster in
| arbitrarily large paper size?
| spekcular wrote:
| Anyone who doesn't have a long list of problems with LaTeX
| doesn't use it enough, or doesn't go beyond the built-in
| templates. Unfortunately, those templates are designed for print
| and not screen viewing ... so you really have to edit them.
|
| I'd be happy to argue this in detail, but I see that others have
| already hit many of the big points. (Some more: The typesetting
| is suboptimal, even if you improve it with the microtype package;
| the default symbols for real and imaginary part (\Re and \Im) are
| horrible; the cleverref package should be built in; the geometry
| package should be built in; the artificial distinction between
| equation and align environments is because the engine can't space
| properly around aligns, so this should be fixed and they should
| be a single command; \left and \right for delimiters often make
| really bad choices; the default font is the only good option if
| you need matching mathematical characters, and it grates on you
| after years of use; I could go on for hours...)
|
| The more interesting question to me is: What should be done about
| this? LaTeX seems too embedded in the scientific community for
| there to be a clean break to a new technology (see, e.g.
| arxiv.org). Also, I'm not sure an entirely new markup language
| would be desirable, since the core LaTeX language is actually not
| so bad - it's the transformation of the markup to the final
| document where the problems occur. What we need is a new backend
| or shim layer that keeps the basic language but allows for more
| aesthetically pleasing rendering and better control of the
| layout.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I don't really see the point of using LaTeX for on-screen
| viewing, well, not unless you want to impose some amount of
| focus on the reader (which printed forms usually do). HTML or
| markdown for on-screen content usually works better.
|
| The main asset of Lamport's LaTeX is its high quality
| formatting for printed artifacts. Most of that in turn comes
| from Knuth's TeX, which is a much lower level language. One can
| do (and many definitely have done) markup to TeX languages, but
| they never expose as much control as LaTeX does, so aren't very
| popular. Madoko (https://www.madoko.net/) does pretty good,
| however, so maybe try that? Otherwise, there are plenty of
| commercial and expensive typesetting systems out there, but
| besides the cost, I don't think they are even as user friendly
| or flexible as LaTeX.
| spekcular wrote:
| I agree that ideally we should _also_ provide an option to
| render into HTML /markdown. But for practical reasons it's
| necessary to have a digital artifact that matches the printed
| artifact in page and line numbering.
|
| I disagree that "The main asset of Lamport's LaTeX is its
| high quality formatting for printed artifacts." The main
| asset for the scientific community is that it lets them
| (relatively) easily write research papers that are dense with
| figures and mathematics. (And these are typically viewed
| online, via arXiv.)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > But for practical reasons it's necessary to have a
| digital artifact that matches the printed artifact in page
| and line numbering.
|
| Unless you are distilling to PDF, this is not viable. But I
| assume you mean PDF output, then you need a screen form
| factor that is paper-like, like an iPad or some other
| letter/A4 style tablet.
|
| You can manipulate math for on-screen documents as well
| (MathML), but (a) it isn't very viable to use them for both
| formats and (b) people who pursue math publications mostly
| love the focus of paper formats (even if they view them on
| a screen as above).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But I assume you mean PDF output, then you need a
| screen form factor that is paper-like, like an iPad or
| some other letter/A4 style tablet.
|
| iPad is closer to A5 than letter/A4, but most things that
| are intended for letter/A4 are probably tolerable on it
| for most users.
|
| iPad Pro is almost exactly US letter size.
| spekcular wrote:
| "But I assume you mean PDF output, then you need a screen
| form factor that is paper-like, like an iPad or some
| other letter/A4 style tablet."
|
| Why do I need this? Concretely, I go to the arXiv. I look
| at the paper a bit on my laptop. Then I print it and read
| it away from my laptop. The printed version has the same
| pagination and layout as the screen version.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Then I print it and read it away from my laptop. The
| printed version has the same pagination and layout as the
| screen version.
|
| You can totally do that, and that is the most common
| case. However, if you had a letter-sized device perfect
| for viewing PDF papers, it wouldn't be "weird" anymore,
| the pagination and layout would just feel like a good
| fit.
| aborsy wrote:
| LaTeX needs to be updated. It's slow, errors need to be better
| handled, packages need to be improved, language should be more
| expressive, etc.
|
| There is beamer for presentation that is a pain to work with.
| Sometimes the most that I can understand from an error message is
| the slide in which the error has occurred. Sometimes I even have
| to incrementally delete the text and compile the remaining text
| to identify the slide location. Sometimes I can't even abort the
| program with Carl+C or D or X after the error has occurred, and I
| have to close the terminal (maybe IDEs are better, but that's
| another can of worms). It's also super slow. I am really in pain
| working with it quite often.
|
| A lot of times, producing the intended behavior in latex requires
| complex hack of internals (see Stack Exchange answers) because
| the feature is not natively supported.
|
| It seems software engineers don't care about LaTeX (and don't use
| it to know about its problems). Academics are also not expert in
| software to fix it. The pace of development thus has been slow.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| Like amichail said in another comment, you could give a try to
| TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org). It is a WYSIWYG document preparation
| system which is at the same time structured and can be
| completely programmed by the user. The name comes from the fact
| that it wants to reach the typographical quality of TeX (the
| author claims that it _surpasses_ it) and the flexibility of
| emacs. I am using it since a few years and I think the reason
| it is not more widespread is that - people do not immediately
| see its potential - LaTeX unfortunately cannot be exported
| reliably b/c of the Turing theorem (really!i I am taking this
| on the word of the developers but they are established
| mathematicians, so I assume they know), and so traps users
|
| A little bit of trying TeXmacs and you could like it!
| jimhefferon wrote:
| > LaTeX needs to be updated.
|
| If you would like to support the ongoing work happening with
| TeX, LaTeX, and friends, please consider joining a user group.
| You can join the TeX Users Group at https://tug.org/join.html,
| or there is a link to instead make a donation at the same page.
| TUG does a lot; see https://tug.org/activities.html, including
| supporting the LaTeX3 project and the development of LuaTeX
| over the years, as well as work on accessibility.
|
| If you prefer, there are many other users groups centered on
| location and lanugage. See https://tug.org/usergroups.html.
| coliveira wrote:
| Excellent! This is a constructive suggestion, instead of the
| rants about LaTeX that amount really to nothing, because the
| whole community around LaTeX will not stop using it just
| because some outsider doesn't like the way it works.
| nokcha wrote:
| >Sometimes I can't even abort the program with Carl+C or D
| after the error has occurred, and I have to close the terminal
|
| In my experience, whenever Ctrl+C doesn't work, LaTeX can be
| terminated by pressing the X key and then Enter. (Look for the
| "Type X to quit or <RETURN> to proceed" in the error message.)
| leephillips wrote:
| To quit when the error handler is asking for input, enter x and
| RETURN.
| amichail wrote:
| Have you tried the WYSIWYG TeXmacs? (It's not based on TeX nor
| emacs but is inspired by both.)
|
| See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U
| yesenadam wrote:
| Maybe it's you? I don't really have any of those problems.
| LaTeX works great for me (I use TexShop on a pretty old mac
| mini) You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! TexShop (I
| hear there are a few other, equally good GUIs) has been nothing
| like a "can of worms", but a delight to use - I can't think of
| any problems I've had with it, in 5+ years. Not having Command-
| Click to be able to instantly shift between somewhere in the
| LaTeX file and the corresponding place in the PDF and back
| would be a pain, I imagine. Or not being able to program your
| own macros. It's slow? Compared to what? It typesets 100 pages
| what seems like pretty fast to me. You know you can pre-compile
| all sections of a long text except the one you're working on,
| right?
|
| Why expect every one of the million features users might want
| be "natively supported"?! What you describe as "a complex hack
| of internals" is usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack
| Exchange and a cut and paste. Although I haven't needed to do
| that in a long time. I was amazed when I started (it did take
| about 3 months of intense learning in the beginning) that every
| package I needed or wanted was already on my computer, and
| usually the author was on TeX stack exchange answering
| questions!
| aborsy wrote:
| I don't want to learn one specialized IDE for every
| application. I use Vim and Emacs for coding in general. There
| are of course plugins, but they didn't notably change the
| experience for me.
|
| The speed problem is mentioned in the Beamer's paragraph.
| It's true to some extent for latex too, but becomes
| problematic with beamer (lots of figures with Tikz and
| pgfplots etc). And I have to use beamer, because the source
| documents are in latex.
|
| When you consider collaborative writing, Overleaf is slow
| even with base latex.
|
| If you use it heavily, you will see its issues. Part of the
| problem is that it's not consistent. In Python, when I type
| print("LaTeX") the answer is always the same. In latex if I
| type, \hspace*{5mm} it depends on many things. This becomes
| specially problematic when the effect you are trying to
| produce is not covered by a common template; the language is
| not fully rule-based either so that you systematically
| produce it yourself. You have to try various things.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| >You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?!
|
| Not OP, but having similar problems as OP. One of the reasons
| I use(d) it in the terminal is because I use make which also
| generates figures for me. I also don't like having to learn X
| different GUIs for Y different programming languages and
| prefer using vim and make if possible.
| yesenadam wrote:
| This is my reply also to aborsy: I also don't use a
| different IDE for every programming language, just VSC or
| Sublime Text for them all. I guess I think of (La)TeX as a
| tool for writing books/papers, not just another programming
| language. TexShop (and I guess the other GUIs) is not like
| vim or emacs, with a million key commands to learn. Most of
| the non-standard key commands I use are ones I defined
| myself, like e.g. Command-I to make selected word/s italic.
| Anyway, refusing to use (La)TeX the easy way, then
| complaining about how hard it is to use, seems hardly
| (La)TeX's fault. We have this incredible publishing
| technology..and you refuse to use it?!
|
| CorrectHorseBat: "I use make which also generates figures
| for me" - I'm curious how that works! Sounds very
| interesting.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| >Anyway, refusing to use (La)TeX the easy way, then
| complaining about how hard it is to use, seems hardly
| (La)TeX's fault.
|
| Not generating clear error messages, or apparently
| requiring a gui as the easy way is definitely Latex's
| (and the tooling around it) fault in my eyes. Latex files
| are text, just give me a decent compiler and let me use
| my own editor. If that is too hard there's something
| wrong.
|
| Also to me all the syntax is unnecessary cryptic, working
| with "variables" is a pain, nice modulatisarion is non-
| existent and probably a few more things I forgot.
|
| >I'm curious how that works! Sounds very interesting.
|
| Nothing really fancy. I have python scripts that
| generates figures which are included in my pdf. I use
| make to stitch everything together.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| LaTeX has a number of issues:
|
| - Compilation feels almost non-deterministic at times. You
| should not have to recompile your document 2 or 3 times to
| get the final behavior, yet that's pretty standard practice.
| References / bibliographies don't work the first time
| through, and often you compile the bibliography separately,
| which is just crazy to me.
|
| - Compilation errors are really non-helpful. In programming,
| if I omit one side of a bracket or parentheses somewhere,
| I'll almost certainly get an error with a reference to the
| line number right at or below the issue. GOOD LUCK finding a
| missing bracket in a LaTeX document based on the error
| messages when compilation fails.
|
| - Lots of pretty simple behavior that really should be
| standardized and built in requires additional packages. The
| real problem comes when combining multiple packages... It's
| like how medications interact. It's almost hopelessly
| intractable to try and predict how multiple packages will
| interact with each other, so the way you do a simple thing in
| one document may change in another document depending on the
| combination of packages.
|
| - >What you describe as "a complex hack of internals" is
| usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack Exchange and a
| cut and paste.
|
| I'm with the person you were replying to on this. There's a
| lot of really hacky stuff to get a result that really should
| have been built in. Like, a built in quote or excerpt for
| example, should just be a standard style like: /begin{quote}
| Quote \end{quote}. But instead you have to do it as a
| \parbox[center]{hope-you-guessed-a-good-width-mm}{Quote}.
|
| - It's a small thing, but the way you do quotes is pretty
| silly. Not a fan of `` '' instead of "". If that's really how
| I have to do it without including additioanl packages, why
| not at least have a built-in like: \lquote and \rquote ?
|
| I am normally a person that is deeply opposed to language
| updates, unnecessary feature updates, new frameworks, etc.
| But in the case of LaTeX, it's one of the most obvious
| examples I can think of where it's desperately needed.
| mcswell wrote:
| "You should not have to recompile your document 2 or 3
| times... References / bibliographies don't work the first
| time through..." If you think about it, you'll probably see
| why. Cross-references can't be set until you know what they
| refer to, which may be later on in the doc ("see section 8
| below"), and setting such references (or citations) can
| change the page numbering. If the multiple passes (which
| are analogous to the multiple passes a compiler makes)
| bother you, then use a tool that hides them from your eyes,
| like arara. That's probably what Word does under the hood.
| coliveira wrote:
| The modern way to use this is through Overleaf. It is just a
| breeze. I had to create a new Beamer presentation from old
| material, and in a few minutes I was able to select a good
| looking theme, import my material, and add pictures to the
| slides. No need to bother setting up a LaTeX environment or
| dealing with error messages directly.
| knolan wrote:
| It's mostly because LaTeX is deemed mature for its audience and
| features like these, while flashy, are not going to see much
| use day to day.
|
| Most academics want to take plots they make in Matlab or
| whatever and put them into the template supplied by a journal
| and get an elegant looking document with well typeset equations
| and a bibTeX bibliography.
| andi999 wrote:
| Tex support by conference and journals is declining though
| (engineering).
| srvmshr wrote:
| I hope this comment was made in jest or sarcasm. No
| respectable conference has replaced LaTeX with Word. Word
| is just a nightmare with typesetting scientific documents,
| with requirements for precise/fixed table & figure
| alignments, gutters, margin delineation etc. Although a
| word template is provided, almost no one uses it for the
| aforementioned reason.
|
| Feel free to check this information's trustworthiness from
| any _top-N_ engineering conference proceeding. Any year of
| your choice. It is easy to verify by looking at metadata
| for the PDF engine that made the document.
| andi999 wrote:
| Maybe this was just a glitch in the matrix:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210419133815/https://irmmw-
| thz...
|
| "We do not provide LaTeX templates as this generates
| technical issues with the IEEE process. If you
| nevertheless decide to use LaTeX,...", seems like a
| slight discouragement.
| knolan wrote:
| I haven't noticed this at all.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| What else are they moving to then?
| andi999 wrote:
| Word.
| tombert wrote:
| I've heard this before but I have not really seen any
| examples of this. It seems like virtually every paper I
| read has been rendered with LaTeX.
|
| I would totally be fine with LaTeX being replaced, but I
| hope to god that I'm not forced to us MS Word all the
| time.
| blt wrote:
| Really? Which venues dropped support?
| tomrod wrote:
| I spent several years as a LaTeX user during graduate school. I
| spend some time in LyX as well.
|
| Then pandoc was released, and markdown let me be more
| expressive with content than dithering with minutia of layout.
| In that vein, I feel LaTeX is awesome but requires a
| comprehensive understanding of all of it to be fully
| expressive. I just want to type my papers quickly, ya know? So
| Markdown gives me what I need, and if a coauthor needs LaTeX
| pandoc can suitably provide.
|
| I keep my resume in TeX, for what its worth. I suppose I keep
| my half-written data science book in it too :)
| andi999 wrote:
| There is also context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt
|
| It always gives me the impression of beiing better structured,
| and it doesnt have module architecture (so no conflicts).
| Unfortunately when a couple of years ago I tried to install it
| on windows the installation was extremely painful, and the
| documentation I found lacking (unfortunately).
| alphachloride wrote:
| This is why I use Microsoft PowerPoint for my schematics.
| ToddWBurgess wrote:
| I have a lot of fond memories of working with LaTeX in the 90s in
| my undergrad. These days I wouldn't use LaTeX because I want
| something quick and dirty.I am not investing a lot of time in
| writing documents that people are not going to spend a lot of
| time reading.
|
| That said, The Lamport book I used heavily in my undergrad still
| has a place on my bookshelf.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Arguably if you spend a lot of time writing a document it
| becomes more likely that others are going to read it.
|
| I am a peer-reviewer and an editor on a few academic journals.
| In my field, a mix of authors use [Xe](La)TeX and Word. There's
| a _definite_ quality bias towards the TeX articles -- not
| because of the typesetting _per se_ but rather because it 's
| indicative of a lot of time spent carefully preparing a
| document to a standard. I'm sure others in similar fields have
| similar experiences.
| amichail wrote:
| Related: https://penrose.ink/siggraph20.html
| gjvc wrote:
| tenuously...
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Well, fuck. Where was _this_ when I was in grad school?
| dash2 wrote:
| Here's how a real man cooks with TeX.
|
| * Carefully sets out header with a tasteful collection of
| packages.
|
| * Sets all tables thoughtfully using \booktabs, never dreaming of
| using vertical borders.
|
| * Uses wysiwym everywhere, \emph for emphasis not \it etc.
|
| * Gets an incomprehensible error because he copied a single
| Unicode character.
|
| * Throws TeX document out of the window, opens text editor, types
| out markdown.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| Or uses TeXmacs
| coliveira wrote:
| Millions of people, including me, disagree. LaTeX has allowed
| me to write articles, books, and other documents for decades,
| and I have not to worry if it will be there in 10 years or
| more. It is the work of genius (Knuth), and continues to be
| widely used.
| dash2 wrote:
| It's used by millions of academics with Stockholm Syndrome.
| ska wrote:
| It's used by millions of academics because it is literally
| the best option, warts and all.
|
| Markdown is vastly under-powered for a lot of things people
| need to do. Word is a hot mess for the same. Etc. etc.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| One needs a different perspective. It is used by millions
| of academics who did not yet try TeXmacs.
| leephillips wrote:
| I use LaTeX. I tried TeXmacs out of curiosity. It's not
| good enough, by far.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, how much time ago did you try it?
| On the one hand the latest version, 2.1.1, runs very
| smoothly and has a complete set of features (the
| extensibility of course allows to augment them, just like
| in TeX); on the other hand TeXmacs has very different
| principles than any other document preparation system and
| need just a bit of time ( _far less then LaTeX_ ) to get
| used to. This blog post by Massimiliano Gubinelli may be
| a good introduction:
| https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-
| writing.htm...
| splittingTimes wrote:
| Have you tried to write any non trivial document with MS
| Word? It is infuriating. Even the simplest tasks don't work
| reliably, like placing a picture with a caption. And oh my
| god if you try to Google for your problem you end up on
| outdated MS doc pages or what the pages describe only works
| in the desktop app and not the online version.
| mcswell wrote:
| And since you brought up Word, I'll add that it has never
| in 30 years done numbering right, whether sections (like
| legal numbering: 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc.) or lists. In fact I
| think it's worse than it used to be; I was tearing my
| hair out recently trying to get it to number lists, which
| is such a simple thing.
| azangru wrote:
| > Have you tried to write any non trivial document with
| MS Word?
|
| The last bullet point in dash2's comment specifically
| says "markdown". Why would you bring up MS Word?
| zokier wrote:
| LaTeX is not made by Knuth, it's from Lamport.
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